Cruising the easy way

One of the things about doing the loop is it expands your cruising horizons. Boating in the Chesapeake has us looking a a few hundred mile trips.

Boating the loop, a trip of ~6,000 miles has us looking at longer trips. One of the things that becomes reachable is going to the Bahama’s. From South Miami, it’s about a 75 mile trip, easily do-able in the Quo Vadimus on a nice day.

One of the problems with the crossing and doing more travel in the Bahamas is the January and February winds are from the north and it can be a little blowy.

We checked into it and doing a two week cruise of the Eastern and Western islands (with a short trip to Mexico) was about $100 per day per person. When we totaled up two weeks of taking the Quo Vadimus over, the cost of fuel, food, moorings, dockings, etc. was a lot more.

By taking a cruise we could see as much, if not more, and at a lower cost. The side benefit is the cruise boat moves at night. So we tour a place, get on, get dinner (cooked and served to us), go to sleep and wake up in a new place to see. Granted there are two “at sea days”, but we are good at finding books to read, etc.

So back in December Susan booked us two weeks of cruising with Holland America. She used a travel agent (Liberty Travel in Pennsylvania) which turned out to be a mistake. Our agent turned out to be a dud and at this point I’d be hesitant to use her to book a kids party at Chuck-E-Cheese.

For the last week of February and first week of March we will be off our boat and cruising on a slightly larger boat.

I’m pretty happy at the onset since the January and February weather did turn out to be a problem. The week before we left there were 6 days of 20+ knot winds ( two days with steady winds of above 30) and temps that dropped into the low 40′s. Not good weather to hang out on the hook. (As an aside, three boats that were anchored out in our marina ended up dragging anchor and came close to hitting boats on the dock.)